


Tiny Threads, Which Sew

by bastet_in_april



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Books, Clothing, Fluff, Good Omens 30th Anniversary, Good Omens Celebration Challenge Prompts, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23957896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastet_in_april/pseuds/bastet_in_april
Summary: Short ficlets written in response to the Good Omens Celebration 30th Anniversary prompts.
Relationships: Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer, Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15
Collections: Good Omens Celebration





	1. Paper (In the Beginning)

Aziraphale had been in love with the written word for far longer than it had been set down on paper.

In the beginning it had been pigments of ochre and iron oxide, carefully applied on stone. Usually, these early words were painted as a series of images, telling a story, or conveying a warning. Little of it had survived the passage of time and the ravages of the elements. When humans had begun carving stone, the messages had lasted a bit longer. There were massive boulders in the East African desert with still-visible graffiti from travelers thousands of years dead. Clay had been a true innovation, though; portable in ways that stone could never be. Cuneiform tablets had been a delight to Aziraphale, and he had had a collection of them--poetry, letters of complaint, recipes, and astronomical texts--until they had been lost to the floodwaters. It had seemed of so little concern at the time, in the face of the destruction and loss of life that he had watched unfold from the wooden deck of Noah’s massive boat. Later, though, when the shock gave way to grief, he had thought of all those words, of voices twice-lost to the waters, who would be forgotten by all but him.

And Crowley. Crowley remembered, and, in the room in the ship’s hold that Aziraphale was studiously pretending he didn’t know was being repurposed to house a crowd of children and a wily demon, Crowley hummed snatches of a lullaby whose composition was now lost to the waters, soothing frightened children to sleep.

Then came paper. Plant matter pulped together with water, and pressed against a mesh, to produce a surface upon which inks and pigments could be applied. It was beautiful. It had a softness and delicacy to it, and the words placed upon it had to be delicately stroked on using a brush. Vellum and parchment might have been longer lasting and more durable, but they stank of the chemicals used in tanning. Paper smelled like nothing so much as itself, and, in Aziraphale’s opinion, that smell only improved with age. Aziraphale had begun collecting paper books from the moment they came into existence. He was sure that there was no innovation that could improve upon them.

Crowley disagreed. It was Crowley who had sought him out one day in 1455, on the pretense of conferring about his latest assignment, and all the little details that needed to be worked out so that reports could be written correctly despite the fact that one of the two preternatural entities turning them in had not been involved in carrying out the assignment. After matters pertaining to the Arrangement had been settled, and Aziraphale had finished his delightful plate of fig tart, with sugared orange peel, Crowley had casually pulled a wrapped package from the rucksack that he had draped over the back of his chair when they had entered the tavern together. He placed the bundle in front of Aziraphale.

“What’s this?” Aziraphale pulled the cloth wrapping open carefully, intrigued. By the shape, it seemed to be...

Crowley shrugged, but looked pleased with himself. “There was this clever chap in Mainz, when I was there, came up with a bit of cutting edge technology. Lets a printer produce a lot of books very quickly and consistently, none of that copying out each page. Called it ‘movable type,’ because you can move the little engraved metal letter stamps around into different patterns for each page. Clever, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale stared down at the leatherbound copy of the Bible. He paged through it, taking in the neat, consistent rows of letters, breathing in the smell of linen paper and new carbon ink. Where were the gamboling dragons, drawn on the pages by bored monks? The spelling errors of unlearned copyists? The additions of some pompous scholar who thought they could improve upon the original material? All those delightfully human idiosyncrasies that Aziraphale loved about books? “Very clever,” Aziraphale assured Crowley, trying to hide his dismay. “Very… neat. Precise.”

Crowley grinned fiendishly. “Bet it won’t stay that way,” he told Aziraphale. “You just wait. The moment this stops being new, they’ll be getting the young apprentices to set the type, and then it's only a matter of time before they start trying to see how many rude words they can spell out in the text without getting caught.”

“Do you think so?” Aziraphale asked, hopefully.

“Oh, Angel. I know so.”

Within the decade, Aziraphale was the proud owner of a modest, but growing, collection of misprint Bibles.

  
  



	2. Contrasts (Cotton Soft)

Aziraphale liked to wear clothing until it softened and gentled, soothed out of harsh creases, all starch gone out of it. He liked pale silks, pillowy cottons, lace that somehow never itched but floated like a cloud at every hem. Aziraphale cherished each piece of clothing like a utilitarian art object.

Crowley preferred his clothing sleek, and angular, in dark fabrics that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. He enjoyed leather and snakeskin, evoking the shape of some other creature over his human-shaped self in a more elegant way than Beelzebub, with zir cloud of buzzing flies, or Hastur, with his web-fingered, grasping toad looming at his brow, would ever contemplate. Crowley discarded clothing easily, readily adopting the newest trends, and had been particularly delighted with the innovation of synthetic fabrics.

In a prison cell in Paris, rubbing his sorely abused wrists, now free of their chains, Aziraphale felt a chill chase itself up his spine. He had had to turn his face away slightly, making a little sound of dismayed delight, to stop his gaze from too obviously devouring the sight of Crowley, in his splendid burgundy coat with its gleaming silver buttons and his exquisitely fitted black hose. But now he was safe from the blade of the guillotine, rescued by this dangerous figure in black and red. What must I look like beside him, Aziraphale wondered, in my silk and lace? Pale as candle flame in a storm, or a daisy crushed into the mud, and Crowley had appeared, cupped his hands around the flame, cradled the petals gently. Surrounded by the darkness of the cell, which stank of fear and human misery, with the jeers and fury of the crowd still loud in his ears, Aziraphale suddenly felt cherished. The contrast they made was something to be delighted in. He wanted to sit across from Crowley, sharing a meal, and have human passerby marvel at the pair they made and wonder at what fairytale adventure had cast them together.

The reality of the bloody terror outside would not allow it, of course, and Aziraphale donned the revolutionary garb of his would-be executioner with a snap of his fingers. Still, the idea lingered, and so did the fierce delight at being rescued, however capable a soldier Aziraphale knew himself to truly be. Looking at him, soft, in his pale cotton and gold embroidery, who would have believed it?

  
  



	3. Unexpected (Leather)

Newton Pulsifer was many things. He was a Witchfinder Private (retired). He was a bit of a nerd, and had taught himself how to knit at age twelve, in order to make himself a Doctor Who scarf. He was chronically unable to find a matching pair of socks, when he got dressed in the morning. He made the best steak pie Anathema had ever had, but was incapable of toasting bread without blackening it to charcoal.

There were even more things that Newton Pulsifer was not. Tall, dark, and handsome, at least by conventional standards, though Anathema thought he pulled off awkwardly endearing (or was it endearingly awkward?) very well. A computer engineer, famously. Anything at all like what Anathema had imagined he would be like, when she had studied Agnes’ book. But certainly, one thing that everyone who met him could agree that Newt was not was  _ cool.  _ Even Newt himself couldn’t dispute it.

So when Newt clambered out of Dick Turpin’s cramped confines, his unfortunate haircut slicked back and a bouquet of tulips in his hand, wearing a _ leather jacket,  _ Anathema boggled. 

“What did you do to your hair? What are you  _ wearing?” _

Newt shuffled from foot to foot, uncomfortably. “I… I know that this--” he scrambled for words for this thing that they hadn’t yet defined, and came up empty “--this-- Us. This all started because of what was in Agnes’ book, and… Well, it could have stopped there, too.” Newt frowned faintly. The cellophane around the bouquet crinkled slightly under his nervous fingers, and Anathema deftly rescued the flowers from Newt’s grip. “When you said you wanted to go out to dinner with me, I--I wanted to seem cool.” He shrugged helplessly. “I just… I really wanted you to like me.”

“I  _ do _ like you,” Anathema told Newt firmly. “I like you because you’re you. I don’t want you to pretend to be someone else. I asked you to dinner because I already do like you, even if you do make the  _ worst  _ jokes, and can’t operate anything smarter than a flip phone, and like to organize your bookshelves by publication date, instead of alphabetically. I want to have dinner with you, Newt, not that picture of James Dean you show your barber every time you go to get a haircut.”

“It never works, anyway,” Newt muttered. “He gives me the same haircut every time, and I never look like James Dean.” He looked more relaxed, though, and his ears had gone a bit red. 

“So, no leather jacket, then?” Newt asked her.

Anathema thought about it. “No,” she decided. “Best not.”

“It’d look better on you, anyway,” Newt reflected.

  
  



End file.
